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From the civil rights movement to Barack Obama

Manning Marable.

Beyond
Black & WhiteBy Manning Marable,Verso Press, 2009, 319 pages

Review by Malik
Miah

Manning Marable’s latest book, Beyond Black & White, is an update of a valuable critique of
Black and US politics first issued in 1995. He revised it last year, adding new
chapters covering the period from 1995 to 2008, including an analysis of the
meaning of the election of the first African-American president of the United
States, Barack Obama, in November 2008.

The closing chapter, “Barack Obama, the 2008
Presidential Election and the Prospects for a ‘Post Racial Politics”, is a good
place to begin reading the collection of articles and essays. Marable’s two prefaces
—for the first and new edition — outline his views on “Black and white” and the
evolution of how race impacts US political conversations and the failure of
leadership in the Black community.

While it is useful to read the book chronologically,
it’s not necessary, since the articles were first published in various
magazines and papers. I do recommend, however, three particular articles on
“Affirmative Action and the Politics of Race”, “Malcolm as Messiah: Cultural
Myth versus Historical Reality”, and “The Divided Mind of Black America: Race,
Ideology and Politics in the Post-Civil-Rights Era”.

Relevant
insights

The meaning of Obama’s election as the first Black president,
what’s happened since his election and its impact on the discussion of Black
leadership and racial politics and racism, US role in world affairs and the
significance of the rapid rise of white racist tea party groups since Obama’s
election can’t be separated from a general backlash that has a clear racial
smell. Marable’s book, in that context, offers some very useful background and
insights. Many of his points, even those made 20 years ago, are completely
relevant to current debates among Black leadership layers and in society as a
whole.

The growth of the tea party movement and white
supremacist militias in particular cannot be ignored even though a majority of
whites don’t subscribe to their extremist views. As a prominent anti-hate group
based in the southern state of Alabama, the Southern Poverty Law Center, has
noted in its research, there has been a 244 per cent increase in hate groups
since Obama’s election. These groups are not just anti-progressive or hard
right, they are also openly racist toward the first African-American president.

As with everything in domestic US politics “race does
matter”. There is an undercurrent of race and racism beneath the surface of
conservative conversation, as shown by recent proclamations by two state
governors (Virginia and Mississippi) hailing the treasonous and defeated Old
Confederacy that fought to maintain “state rights” – the code words to keep
chattel slavery.

As unique as it is that the country elected its first
African-American president, the bigotry among a sizable layer of white
Americans remains strong in parts of the country. The United States is not a
“post-racial society” as some like to proclaim. The contradiction of some
saying, “I’m not racist”, while promoting openly racist ideas, honouring slaveowners
of the past, is more and more common since Obama’s election.

(I’m employed as an airline mechanic in San Francisco,
for instance, where I work with white co-workers who don’t see themselves as
having racist positions but who accept the most outrageous racial smears of
Obama and the Black community. My reaction is not, “I understand your sentiment
since you hate big government and Wall Street.” Instead I say, “Racism is wrong
no matter why you say it, and must be repudiated.” It is never acceptable to
bend to backward attitudes especially among fellow workers.)

Long
history of activism

Marable has the credentials both as an academic who
has published numerous books and activist to write on the subjects of race and
racism and general politics. He is a professor of African American studies and professor
of public affairs, history and political science at Columbia University in New
York City. He has a long history of activism and an insight into questions of
debate within the Black movement. I first met him at the first convention of
the National Black Independent Political Party convention in 1972 in Gary,
Indiana. Marable, like me and other activists, came to Gary to advocate the
formation of a new political party based on independent Black politics. The
party was formed, but never reached its potential.

Marable looks back at the main events of the Black
movement, focusing on the lessons of the civil rights movement. Many of the
essays look at the issues from the “prism of race” and racism in the country.

As he explains in the preface to the first edition,
“The main thesis of the book is that ‘race’ as it has been understood within
American society is being rapidly redefined, along with the basic structure of
the economy, with profound political consequences for all sectors and classes...
Because this social transformation is occurring at a political conjuncture
dominated by conservative ideology and a retreat from welfare state politics,
race relations and racial discourse are reflected within an altered debate
about the character of discrimination, the nature of prejudice, and invented
notions about who the ‘real victims’ of inequality are. A new generation of
white Americans, born largely after the civil rights movement, felt little or
no historical responsibility or social guilt for being the beneficiaries of
institutional racism.” (Page xi.)

As true as that statement was in 1995, it is more so
today. Marable points out in the second preface that he was too optimistic
about the true possibility of building a new, militant leadership and alliance
to take on institutional racism. The full integration of the Black middle-class
leadership into the government and corporate world still had not run its course
— and still hasn’t. The result is a working-class and poor population without a
viable leadership team on a national scale to play the role that old leadership
had did under legal segregation.

Impact
of Black elite

Marable explains in looking back nearly 15 years after
the publication of the first edition: “Beyond
Black and White was overly optimistic and strategically in error in its
treatment of social class as a factor in the development of social protest
movements. Despite my criticisms of the Black elite’s comprador tendencies, its
support for gentrification, and its crass manipulation of racial rhetoric to
occasionally mobilize Blacks against their real material interests, I
overestimated the weight of historic racial solidarity and Black identity as
positive forces in shaping new black protests.” (Page xxvii.)

Marable indicates that the “bourgeoisification” of the Black elite and its
integration into the political and economic system led away from protest
politics. What he and many others had hoped for was a vibrant left movement in
the Black community that would create a new leadership. One such formation was
the Black Radical Congress (BRC) that he helped found but did not survive.

As he clearly articulates in the second preface, “The
new leadership for democratic renewal would have to come from working class and
low-income women involved in neighborhood associations and networks, from
former prisoners, inmates and their families who were fighting against the
prison industrial complex, from liberal religious activists inside faith-based
institutions, and from the hip-hop artistic community.”

That didn’t happen.

“What emerged instead”, he explains, “given the vacuum
on the Left, was the Barack Obama mobilization, a movement led by an African-American
race-neutral, post-Black campaign that rarely made references to the central
American dilemma of race.” (Page xxix.)

Obama’s
election as president

In the closing chapter on the significance of the
Obama victory (the book was completed soon after Obama’s electoral victory and
well before evidence came in during his first year of office that he was a
continuing the policies of the ruling elites and thus doing very little for the
Black community), Marable observes that, “By the twenty-first century, hundreds
of race-neutral, pragmatic Black officials had emerged, winning positions on
city councils, state legislatures and in the House of Representatives.
Frequently they distanced themselves from traditional liberal constituencies
such as unions, promoted gentrification and corporate investment in poor urban
neighborhoods, and favored funding charter schools as an alternative to the
failures of public school systems.” (Page 301.)

Yet these “pragmatic promotions” did not lead to vast
improvements for the working poor. Less self-organisation and solidarity within
the community took place than Marable and others had expected. There was not a
rise of new Black Power-type leaders that was seen during the 1960s when the
civil rights movement won legal gains and sparked left-wing radicalism in the
Black community (e.g., the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary
Black Workers, and Black nationalist and pan-African currents).

Failure
of the `new’ pragmatism

What occurred instead was the convergence of the very
tiny but ideologically driven Black conservative layers with the new pragmatism
of the liberal Black elite. Both groups reject old-style street protests as a
strategy to influence government or bring change. The policy of working within
the system and seeking cross-over votes from whites is seen as the way forward
to eradicate institutional discrimination and achieve full equality for Blacks.

Black conservatives go further by aligning themselves
with the most right-wing views that oppose affricative action and reject racial
identity politics and solidarity. These elements pretend to deny their
Blackness except when it can be used to attack liberalism or when it serves
their own self-interests when they themselves are under attack.

(The best example of the hypocritical stance of Black
conservatives was the case of Black Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas who
attacked his liberal critics as organising a “legal lynching” during his
nomination to the court some 20 years ago. Today the Black head of the Republican
Party, Michael Steele, is using the race card to respond to his critics.)

President Obama does not deny his Blackness or any of
the other Black officials (in the recent US census form, Obama self-identified
himself as “Black” even though he is of mixed parentage).

The new generation of pragmatic leaders see the
for-profit system as the solution to institutional racism — something the
assassinated civil rights hero Martin Luther King himself began to reject
before his murder in Memphis, Tennessee, while supporting striking sanitation
workers in 1968.

As Marable explains in his closing chapter on Obama,
“In fairness, Obama never claimed to be an ideologue of the left. He promoted a
post-partisan government and a leadership style that incorporated the views of
conservatives and liberals alike.” (Page 309.)

The reality of Black politics in 2010 is that there is
no serious left challenge to Obama and the Black elite’s perspectives. Only a
few voices can be heard urging a return to past tactics to advance the interests
of the oppressed in the era of Obama.

Politics
of protests

Tavis Smiley, a nationally syndicated radio and
television host, recently produced a documentary on Martin Luther King’s famous
speech given at Riverside Church in New York City in 1967. King pointedly
rejected the policy of the US government and the argument of other civil rights
leaders and his organisation’s own board not to speak out on non-civil rights
issues such as the war in Vietnam. He also criticised the so-called free market
system that puts profit before human rights. (Go to http://links.org.au/node/336 to view the video.)

The steady decline of extralegal actions by the left
and the Black community (including against the Iraq and Afghanistan wars) also gives
the far right the streets as it raises the banner of being against “big
government” while its leaders are in bed with Wall Street.

The Black community, in this context, is left on the
sidelines waiting to see what Obama and the new pragmatists can do for them
instead of taking to the streets to defend their own interests. This inaction
flies in the face of African-American history.

During WWII, for example, the mainstream Black
leadership planned the March on Washington to demand equality, jobs, and spoke
out against the racism of the war effort. It didn’t matter that Blacks were
charged with aiding the enemy and being unpatriotic for doing so. The march
never happened after the government agreed to make some concessions.

The high unemployment during the current “Great
Recession” would seem to be a time to go back to the streets. Yet the
significant up-tick of white militia groups and open bigotry since Obama’s
election has become the new excuse by self-proclaimed leaders not to respond
with mass action. The Obama proponents continue to push a legislative response
instead of using extra-legal actions as occurred in the past. While this weak
response to a Democrat Party president is not new historically speaking, the
demobilisation and lack of action is far greater today among African Americans
because of the Obama factor, who still receives 90 per cent support in Black
communities across the country.

Call
for a new leadership

Marable, remaining true to his long-time radicalism,
argues for building a “new, antiracist” leadership. “A new antiracist
leadership”, he states, “must be constructed to the left of the Obama
government that draws upon representatives of the most oppressed and
marginalized social groups within our communities: former prisoners, women activists
in community-based, civic organizations, youth groups, from homeless
coalitions, and the like. Change must occur not from the top down, as some
Obama proponents would have it, but from the bottom up.”

While I agree with Marable’s “bottom-up” strategy,
what’s ultimately needed is a powerful independent political movement that
directly challenges the ideology of the for-profit status quo, including the
two-party system that runs the United States.

The creation of a mass-based working-class party is
still a long-term strategic objective for the left. We are not in a period of
left political radicalism but a bottom-up protest movement is not enough
either. The left needs to openly proclaim as its goal of building a new
political party.

It’s not surprising that the policies of Obama on
Black issues are actually to the right of the last two Democrat presidents,
Bill Clinton and James Carter. The social protest movements are small and
ineffective. Until that changes, the weak trade unions and civil rights groups are
not likely to be revitalised, and there will continue to be as steady shift to
the right in general and among the Black elites.

[Malik Miah is an editor of the US socialist organisation Solidarity's magazine Against
The Current. He is a long-time
activist in trade unions and a campaigner for Black rights. A shorter version of this review appeared in Green Left Weekly.]